Bypass Lane is a service that lets you use your phone to order food and then skip the concessions line at ballparks. It’s a great looking app and well designed website too. There’s an HTML5 web app along with native apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. I originally saw it advertised at the Ballpark in Arlington. I didn’t get to try the app at the game (the service isn’t available up in the cheap seats) but it seems like a great idea to avoid long lines at a big game.
Dribbble introduces Browse by Color
Incredible. Pick a color use the color picker, browse pages and pages of shots that use that color. You can even define your own hex value, color variance, and color minimum. Great source of inspiration. Check out the blog post describing how it works.
Using Modern Techniques for Great Web Typography
Great typography use is one of the most important factors in creating beautiful design. Unfortunately, at the same time web typography has been the most limiting and frustrating technology in web design and development for some time. Not too long ago, nearly every creative brief or brand conversation with clients would include the topic of which fonts we could use on their website. The answer would always lead to the depressing answer of choosing between Arial, Verdana, or a half dozen other typically supported fonts. Modern browsers and modern techniques are finally changing that.
There have been many different font replacement techniques over the years but each has had critical limitations that made them only practical for certain uses with certain designs. Image replacement using CSS looks and works great and is great for SEO but it could only be used sparingly because it requires creation of a new image and CSS changes to implement. sIFR was an ingenious workaround using Flash to replace text on the fly with beautifully rendered text, but alas it had many performance and occasional display issues and was difficult to maintain as new browser updates were released.
So, are we just stuck with Georgia headings until the end of time? Thankfully, no…
CSS3 and @font-face to the Rescue.
There are finally new tools at our disposal (and more importantly browsers that actually support them) that are helping create a more beautiful web. Newly supported CSS3 properties and some clever web services give us the ability to easily and securely embed thousands of different fonts that we were never able to use before. And using the @font-face rule these fonts are treated no differently* by the browser from the websafe fonts we’ve been using for so long.
Check out this example using CSS (rendered in your browser):
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
As you can see from the example, there is a lot of power in using regular HTML text and CSS for the typography. And almost all of it works in every modern browser. The cool Lobster font is embedded from Google and then just like any other text we’re able add a link with a hover effect, a CSS3 text-shadow, and a dotted underline with a tooltip to define the word. And of course it’s as easy to change as any other text on the website using a CMS.
Continue reading “Using Modern Techniques for Great Web Typography”
Think Apps are All That Matters for Mobile? Think Again.
The buzz out there now is all about apps. Whether it’s for iPhone or Android, you can’t visit Yahoo.com or watch the local news without hearing all about the latest, greatest mobile app. Dedicated apps that users install from app stores have a lot of advantages and there are some out there we all can’t live without, but you can’t ignore the mobile web.
Two apps that are on most every smartphone user’s home screen are Twitter and Facebook. They’re two of the best designed apps out there and both have been in the top 25 free apps in the iTunes App Store consistently since launch. Knowing that you might think Facebook and Twitter users always take advantage of those great apps when they’re on the go, but the numbers say otherwise. Based on numbers aggregated by Luke Wroblewski, mobile usage of the top two social juggernauts continues to explode and much of it is on the mobile version of their websites:
- 50% of the more than 500 million active Facebook users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices (250M) compared to 25% a year ago (100M out of 400M). 33% of Facebook posts are sent via mobile devices. (source)
- Facebook’s top mobile client is m.facebook.com (Facebook’s mobile Web site) with 18% of total new Facebook posts. Android, iPhone, and Blackberry are next each with about 4% of total new Facebook posts. (source)
- 50% of total active Twitter users are on multiple platforms (mobile) compared to 25% a year ago. 40% of all tweets are sent via mobile. (source)
- Twitter’s top mobile client is m.twitter.com (Twitter’s mobile Web site) with 14% of total unique users. SMS is next with 8% of total unique users. Then Twitter for iPhone (8%) followed by Twitter for Blackberry (7%). (source)
For both sites, a much higher percentage of people are using the mobile website than any particular mobile app. On Twitter, even SMS is still ahead of the iPhone and Blackberry apps. Whether it’s because they’re on older phones or because they’re following links in an email or a search result (remember that links don’t open apps), it’s clear that just because you offer an app doesn’t mean your mobile web presence is any less important.
Toyota releases, pulls down iPhone theme for jailbroken phones
There are lots of reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. Getting this official Toyota Scion theme is no longer one of them. It wasn’t actually good looking or useful, but it was interesting to see a big company like Toyota putting something out of Cydia. Of course Apple didn’t like that, and has forced Toyota to pull the theme down and it is no longer available. (via MobileCrunch)
Whoops. Chrysler tweets that people of Detroit can’t drive.
Don’t know how I missed this when it happened, just found this errant tweet from @ChryslerAutos about how Detroit people can’t drive via CNNMoney’s article on painful social media screw ups. This is why I don’t link my work-related accounts to my phone or any app I use for personal tweets.
Twitter Turns Five
Yesterday, March 14th, was the fifth birthday of Twitter and to go along with that they’ve released some interesting numbers that show the incredible growth of the service. The current numbers versus five years ago are impressive but the huge jumps between the daily statistics now versus only a year ago are even more so. Continue reading “Twitter Turns Five”
Facebook Changes Give “Likes” More Attention
This weekend Facebook made a simple but possibly very important change to the way “liked” links are displayed on users’ profile pages. They now function similar to shared links and display chronologically within the timeline with a large headline, short text description, and thumbnail image. Previously they only displayed a small text link grouped with other minor informational notices.
This change means that visitors to your website or blog who take two seconds to click the “Like” button are now prominently promoting your content on their Facebook Wall. This is a much lower barrier than the previous sharing functionality which required users to click a link, interact with a popup window, enter comments about the link, and then submit the form to share a link.
While a “Like” button takes up more space on the page than a share link, the updated functionality and ease of use mean that in most scenarios it is the preferable solution to including a share link. It completely eliminates the need to ever have both a Facebook “Like” and “Share” on the same page and may mean the end the use of the share functionality altogether.
WordPress 3.1 Released
The newest version of WordPress, version 3.1 codenamed “Reinhardt”, has been released and is available to download or via an autoupdate from the dashboard.
In addition to over 800 bug fixes, this update includes a new admin bar, a cleaner writing interface, and more flexibility for theme developers. WordPress 3.1 also focuses heavily on continuing to turn WordPress into a low end CMS option by adding functionality around their custom post formatting and content type features that were introduced in the 3.0 update.
Will Apple’s New App Store Subscriptions Force Mobile Development Towards HTML5?
We knew it would be coming when News Corp’s The Daily debuted with it’s in-app subscription model, but this week Apple officially detailed their new subscription service for all iOS app publishers. The new policies allow users to sign up for weekly, monthly, or yearly subscriptions and they can easily pay via the same App Store billing system they used to grab Angry Birds. Apple will handle all the payments and management of the subscriptions and users can go to a single place to cancel any subscriptions they have purchased.
Wow. This is great news… isn’t it?
Turns out it may not be that simple.
Yes, Apple is making it easy to get your subscription content into the App Store and in front of those millions of potential customers, but they’re going to take the same 30% cut they do from any other App Store transaction. And there are also some huge caveats that are making many developers very upset. Check out these two excerpts from Apple’s announcement:
All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app.
And also…
…publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.
Essentially, that means you can no longer link to your subscription options online and if you offer a subscription service elsewhere you must also offer it from within the app. And give 30% to Apple every time a payment is processed.
30% on the initial sale of an app is fair. Apple has built the store, provided the marketplace, and given developers access to millions of consumers. With subscriptions, they are acting as little more than a payment gateway. It is up to the developer of the app to create the subscription features, develop the extra content, communicate to the user that they exist, and then finally convince them to sign up. Apple has no role in converting an app user into a premium subscriber. Even PayPal’s high transaction fees are less than 3% on most transactions. Apple wants 27% more than that just to process your payments.
They’re also not going to let you tell users subscriptions are available elsewhere. The press release stated that if you do offer subscriptions on your website you are required to also offer them from within the app so Apple can get their share. For many SaaS companies, it may not be a sustainable business model if you’re having to give away that much of each sale. Especially when your service is primarily web-based and the iOS app is just a tool for existing customers.
Think about companies such as 37signals who have been thriving for years selling subscription services online. Is there anyone out there looking at the App Store first when evaluating large, full featured project management tools? An iPhone app doesn’t help them sell more subscriptions. It’s just a viewer and a way to do simple tasks in a service you already pay for.
Even more confusing, 37signals and many other companies offer APIs which allow third party companies to develop sites and programs that access their data. There are at least 11 iPhone apps currently available for 37signals’ Basecamp, none of which are actually from 37signals and therefore have no right or ability to sell subscriptions to the service. But Apple’s new rules say that these apps must include a way for Apple to sell an in-app subscription in order to be approved. The new rules are just too broad to be fairly applied in every single case.
Will these changes force some developers to decide against offering iOS versions of their apps? If a service already has a large customer base and doesn’t need Apple’s marketing help, does it make more sense for them to develop their mobile apps in HTML5? Developing with HTML5 would save money on cross-platform development while they also maintain complete control over their subscription revenue. That’s exactly the direction 37signals went earlier this month when they launched a non-native, brand new mobile web app for Basecamp even before these new rules were public.
Overall, the whole thing is clear as mud. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the new rules may raise possible antitrust issues. Apple needs to quickly clarify and possibly amend the new policies and explain when they apply, or they will soon be facing a backlash from the very developers whose work has made the iPhone and iPad a monumental success.